Swedish prime minister Stefan Löfven confirmed on Monday that private information concerning citizens of Sweden had been exposed to serious security risks after the government outsourced IT services for the Swedish Transport Agency (Transportstyrelsen) to IBM in 2015.

IBM, in turn, left an astounding amount of information exposed to a number of unauthorized users around the world — including the names, home addresses, and photos of every member of the police, secret military units, information from the witness-relocation program, information regarding the weight capacity of all roads and bridges, and details regarding the specifications of all government and military vehicles (and their drivers).

Apparently, the transport agency mistakenly emailed their entire database of sensitive information to marketers in plain text. And upon realizing their error, the agency decided to merely ask subscribers to delete the old message and later sent out an updated one.

The information age seems to have caught most "world leaders" unprepared. Their confident "digital transformation strategies" have finished in a face-plant. Though the Swedish scandal superficially concerns data loss it also underlines how vulnerable traditionally acceptable political corruption and incompetence is in the 21st century.

[what] upsets a lot of people is the fact that everybody was aware they were breaking the law by being negligent with classified information, but just didn’t care. ... By now, mainstream media has published documents that show that the Interior Minister and the Infrastructure Minister were completely aware of the ongoing leaks as early as 18 months ago, and they said and did nothing.

Part of what IBM contracted to was run, and which was run from Serbia, was the Swedish government’s secure intranet – the SGSI, the Secure Government Swedish Intranet. This network is in turn connected to the European Union’s STESTA, which is a European Union secure network. This is what the Swedish Transport Agency gave staff in Serbia administrative network access to, and it is no conspiracy theory that Serbia is a close military ally with Russia. While it can’t be proven in this specific case that high-value military information in Serbia’s hands also comes into Russia’s hands, it’s one of those things that should just be assumed in the general case.

The net effect here is that the EU secure Intranet has been leaked to Russia by means of deliberate lawbreaking from high ranking Swedish government officials. Even if there are additional levels of encryption on STESTA, which there may or may not be, this has “should never happen” written all over it.

We're not in Kansas any more. Hillary famously claimed she understood the implications of artificial intelligence and robotics but does she really? Did the Swedes really? It's entirely possible that, despite their show of outward confidence no one fully understands the changes we've unleashed, least of all politicians nurtured in bureaucracy. The death of privacy appears to be an externality of the information age just as pollution was the unintended consequence of the industrial revolution. Nobody knows how much it will cost and the elite doesn't know how to deal with it.

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Though governments pretend to be in control the facts suggest otherwise. Part of the problem is the government's habit of power. They've had it for so long they think it is theirs by right. Bureaucrats want the public to remain unprotected by encryption, the better to keep the public safe, though probably the better to keep everyone under control. And they're not succeeding. As Sweden shows government itself is often hardly better off than anyone else. In the near future the only places privacy will survive is in failed states too primitive to keep records or so lawless they've torched everything.

The world order has already lost the nuclear containment battle. It's lost the immigration battle. Now it appears they're about to lose the privacy battle. Perhaps complexity is finally getting the better of the old global elite. In a little noted article at the end of 2016 the New York Times noted that for "the first time since World War II that trade with other nations has declined during a period of economic growth ... there are also signs that the slowdown is becoming structural. Developed nations appear to be backing away from globalization."

Europe is fraying around the edges; low tariffs and transportation costs cannot get much lower. And China’s role in the global economy is changing ...the share of imported components in products “Made in China” has fallen to 35 percent from 60 percent in the 1990s ... China joined this club the old-fashioned way: It used factories to build a middle class. But the automation of factory work is making it harder for other nations to follow.

But no one is quite sure what comes next. A World Economic Forum paper thinks that globalization is just catching its breath, leaving the physical world and going digital; that business is tunneling mental and even physical services across the wire. In the new global world nobody will come across the Mediterranean any more, just commute across the Internet. "Digital platforms like Alibaba and Amazon enable even small-scale entrepreneurs to connect directly with customers and suppliers around the world, transforming themselves into 'micro multinationals.'"

Yet it's a savage commentary on the World Order if the wire does seem a safer place than a planet haunted by terrorism, war and identity politics and spying. It is eerie too, as if Harlan Ellison's dystopic vision of humanity sheltering in the artificial cortex of Trent -- "a full-grown man born ten days ago" -- until the Kyben threat abated were coming true. Yet as the Swedish disaster showed, there is no safety -- least of all in the government's version of the Demon with the Glass Hand.

The mechanisms of the 20th century proved themselves unprepared for the side effects of the technological revolution. The multicultural project never anticipated that an age where Facebook offers its users 71 choices of gender would create so much noise Government could not guarantee safety from the resulting complexity. They would be so overwhelmed by their own perfection that they cannot "save the planet". Perhaps they cannot even save themselves.

Keep these in mind as you contemplate the direction of the American government over the past 50 years and especially since the Obama election.

The Goals of Communism

(as read into the congressional record January 10, 1963, from "The Naked Communist" by Cleon Skousen)

1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.

2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.

3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament of the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.

4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.

5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.

6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.

7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.

8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.

9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.

10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.

11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)

12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.

13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.

14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.

15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.

16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.

17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.

18. Gain control of all student newspapers.

19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.

20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.

21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.

22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."

27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a "religious crutch."

28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."

29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.

30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."

31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.

32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.

33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.

34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.

36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.

37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.

38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand.

39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.

40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.

41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.

42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use united force to solve economic, political or social problems.

43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.

44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.

45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike.